According to Google Insights for Search, which “analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains,” there was more interest in the word “news” during the month of March than any other month since July 2005.
The graph below shows search volume (for the word news) on a scale from 0 to 100. Volume was 100 in July 2005, and 96 in March 2011. Read about how Insights for Search works to learn more about the graph.
Search engines must be paying newsrooms to send them traffic. Okay, I’m sure that’s not true, but it feels like it is true when I read articles published by media companies online. Every day, I run into stories that might as well include these promotional bullet points:
As a news consumer, I actually hate that I have to go to Google for that information all the time. I want articles to lead me to all that information, much like many blog posts do.
Google links to 6,597 articles related to the three stories atop Google News this morning.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ksablan/5363334529/
I’m not saying that news organizations should link to thousands of other articles at a time, but wouldn’t it be a great service to the reader if reporters and editors pointed to those articles that would help provide a more comprehensive picture of the story?
A well picked set of 5 (pick your number) related stories could be more useful than the thousands of results that Google returns.
If you don’t already have them in your bookmarks, make sure to visit Mediagazer to see how computers and human editors can work together to provide great sets of links about a niche topic.
According to Google Trends, people search for the word journalism 55% less than they did six years ago. This chart shows how many searches for journalism have been made since January 2004, using the average during that month as a volume of 1. Number crunchers, feel free to take a look at the week-by-week data.
Compare that to the search for the word news, which has held on to an increase of about 10% that it experienced in 2008.
People who use Google for search are looking for a little more news, and much less journalism.
Do people want less journalism, or are they defining journalism differently? Should journalists start worrying less about journalism and more about news? Should they ignore these numbers? How should news organizations react? How does citizen journalism fit into this picture? Is there an empirical definition of news today?